17+ Fruits That Start With E: Taste, Origin, And How To Use Each One

Most people know eggplant, but the letter E holds a much wider range of produce. Fruits that start with E include tangy elderberries, custard-like eggfruit, creamy emblic, fragrant etrog, and wild varieties like emu apple from the Australian outback. Some are intensely sour, others rich and sweet, and a few are grown more for ritual or medicine than flavor.

What makes this group interesting is how different they look, taste, and grow. These fruits range from thumb-sized berries to palm-heavy citrus, with skins that run from bright purple to pale yellow. The textures shift just as much, from firm and tart to soft and buttery.

With that much variety packed into one letter, telling them apart takes more than a name. Here, you will find each fruit with its taste, texture, color, size, growing region, season, and real kitchen uses — whether you are matching a name to a picture or figuring out how to cook with something new.

List Of Fruits That Start With E

Early Gold Mango

Developed in Florida during the 1940s, the Early Gold mango ripens weeks ahead of most commercial varieties, often bearing fruit as early as May. The flesh is deep gold, completely fiberless, and sweet enough to eat without any seasoning.

Unlike Tommy Atkins or Kent mangoes that dominate supermarket shelves, Early Gold has thinner skin and a softer, creamier texture that falls apart on the tongue rather than pulling apart in strings. Florida growers prize it as the first fresh mango of the season.

• Taste: Rich, sweet, zero fiber
• Origin: Florida, USA
• Best use: Eating fresh, mango lassi, tropical smoothies

Early Girl Tomato

Botanically a fruit because it develops from a flowering ovary and contains seeds, the Early Girl tomato is a garden staple across North America. It matures in about 50 days, faster than almost any other slicing tomato.

The flavor runs bright and acidic with a slight sweetness underneath. It performs best in summer salads, on sandwiches, or sliced with salt and olive oil. If you grow tomatoes and want the first harvest on your block, Early Girl delivers.

• Taste: Bright, tangy, mildly sweet
• Origin: North America (hybrid cultivar)
• Best use: Fresh slicing, summer salads, sandwiches

Eastern Hawthorn Fruit

Clusters of small red berries appear on thorny Crataegus aestivalis shrubs throughout the southeastern United States, usually ripening in May. Locals call them “mayhaws,” and the tart fruit is a regional delicacy when cooked into jelly.

Raw, hawthorn berries taste sharp and astringent. Cooked with sugar, they transform into a rosy, apple-scented preserve that Southerners spread on biscuits and cornbread. The berries cling to branches well into winter, making the shrubs easy to spot even after leaf drop.

• Taste: Tart, astringent raw; apple-sweet when cooked
• Origin: Southeastern United States
• Best use: Mayhaw jelly, preserves, syrups

Egg Fruit (Canistel)

Cut open an egg fruit and you will understand the name immediately. The dense, dry flesh is the exact color and texture of a cooked egg yolk, and the flavor sits somewhere between baked sweet potato and vanilla custard.

Native to southern Mexico and Central America, the canistel tree now grows across the Caribbean, the Philippines, and parts of Southeast Asia. The fruit is eaten fresh with a spoon, blended into milkshakes, or mashed into batter for cakes and flans. It pairs especially well with condensed milk and coconut.

• Taste: Sweet, dense, custardy
• Origin: Southern Mexico, Central America
• Best use: Smoothies, custard desserts, flan, milkshakes

Eggplant

Glossy, deep purple, and spongy on the inside, the eggplant is technically a berry in the nightshade family. Over 80% of global production happens in Asia, where the fruit originated thousands of years ago.

The raw flesh tastes bitter and somewhat metallic, but heat transforms it entirely. Roasted eggplant turns silky and smoky. Fried slices absorb sauces like bread soaks up broth. It anchors dishes from Italian melanzane alla parmigiana to Middle Eastern baba ghanoush to Indian baingan bharta.

• Taste: Mild, savory, smoky when roasted
• Origin: South and Southeast Asia
• Best use: Grilling, roasting, curries, dips

Eglantine Fruit (Rose Hip)

The eglantine, or sweetbriar rose (Rosa rubiginosa), produces small, oval rose hips that ripen to a bright orange-red in autumn. The plant’s apple-scented leaves make it a favorite in European hedgerows and cottage gardens.

Rose hips are packed with Vitamin C and have a tangy, slightly floral taste when dried and brewed into tea. They also appear in Scandinavian soups, British preserves, and herbal supplements. Pick them after the first frost, when the cold softens the flesh and concentrates the flavor.

• Taste: Tangy, floral, mildly sweet
• Origin: Europe, Western Asia
• Best use: Herbal tea, preserves, Vitamin C supplements

Egusi

At first glance, egusi looks like a small watermelon. The resemblance stops at the rind. The flesh of this West African gourd is dry, bitter, and inedible. What makes egusi valuable is the fat-rich seed inside.

Ground egusi seeds thicken soups and stews across Nigeria, Ghana, and Cameroon, giving dishes a creamy, nutty body. The seeds taste similar to pumpkin seeds but with a richer, oilier texture. Egusi soup, cooked with spinach, palm oil, and dried fish, is one of the most recognized dishes in West African cuisine.

• Taste: Seeds are nutty, creamy, oily
• Origin: West Africa
• Best use: Egusi soup, stew thickener, roasted snack

Elands Sour Fig

A sprawling succulent native to South Africa’s coastal regions, the elands sour fig (Carpobrotus acinaciformis) produces small, fleshy fruits that taste salty, sour, and faintly sweet all at once.

The fruit hides beneath thick, moisture-filled leaves that must be peeled back. Fresh off the plant, the flavor is bracing and unusual. Most people dry the fruit or cook it into a strongly flavored jam that balances salt and sweetness. If you have tasted ice plant, the flavor profile falls in the same family.

• Taste: Salty-sour, faintly sweet
• Origin: South Africa
• Best use: Jam, dried fruit, preserves

Elderberry

Dark purple, almost black, elderberries grow in heavy drooping clusters on Sambucus shrubs across the Northern Hemisphere. They have become one of the most sought-after berries in natural health circles, and for good reason.

Do not eat elderberries raw. The uncooked berries, along with the leaves, bark, and stems, contain cyanogenic glycosides that cause nausea, vomiting, and stomach cramps. Cooking breaks down these compounds entirely. Simmered into syrup, elderberries develop a rich, earthy, wine-like flavor that blends well with honey and ginger. Elderberry syrup is a winter-season staple in many households.

• Taste: Tart, earthy, wine-like when cooked
• Origin: Europe, North America, parts of South America and Australia
• Best use: Syrups, jams, wine, tea, gummies

Elephant Apple

Roughly the size of a grapefruit but much harder, the elephant apple (Dillenia indica) grows wild across South and Southeast Asia. The green, segmented fruit has a thick, woody shell that takes a heavy knife or machete to crack open.

Inside, the sour, fibrous flesh tastes intensely acidic, closer to an unripe green mango than any apple. In Assamese and Bengali cooking, elephant apple is simmered into tangy chutneys, dal preparations, and fish curries. The sourness works as a natural souring agent, much like tamarind. Wild elephants eat the fallen fruit whole, which is how the name stuck.

• Taste: Intensely sour, tangy, fibrous
• Origin: India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia
• Best use: Chutneys, fish curry, dal, pickles

Emblica (Amla)

One bite of a raw amla fruit (Phyllanthus emblica) floods your mouth with a sourness so sharp it makes your eyes water. Then, a few seconds later, a surprising wave of sweetness follows. That sour-to-sweet rebound is what makes emblica unforgettable.

Gram for gram, amla is one of the richest natural sources of Vitamin C on the planet. In Ayurvedic medicine, it anchors chyawanprash, a thick herbal paste taken daily for immunity across South Asia. Beyond medicine, amla is pickled with mustard oil and spices, dried into tangy candy (amla candy), or powdered and mixed into hair oils. It grows abundantly across India and Nepal.

• Taste: Sharply sour with a sweet aftertaste
• Origin: India, Nepal, Southeast Asia
• Best use: Pickles, chyawanprash, dried candy, powdered supplements

Emu Apple

Found across the dry woodlands of inland Australia, the emu apple (Owenia acidula) is a small, red-skinned fruit about the size of a cherry. A large stone fills most of the interior, leaving a thin layer of edible flesh around it.

The flavor is mildly sweet and slightly acidic. Indigenous Australians have eaten emu apples for thousands of years, often after soaking them in water to soften the flesh. The fruit drops from the tree when ripe and was historically gathered from the ground rather than picked from branches.

• Taste: Mildly sweet, slightly tart
• Origin: Inland Australia
• Best use: Eating fresh, soaking, bush food preparations

Emu Berry

Another Australian native, the emu berry (Grewia retusifolia) grows on low, spreading shrubs across northern and central Australia. The small, dark berries are crunchy with a mild sweetness and almost no tartness.

Birds, especially emus, eat the berries in large quantities, scattering seeds across the landscape. Indigenous communities eat emu berries fresh, straight off the bush. They are not commercially cultivated and remain a wild-foraged food.

• Taste: Sweet, crunchy, mild
• Origin: Northern and central Australia
• Best use: Fresh eating, bush foraging

Entawak

Spiky on the outside and pumpkin-orange on the inside, the entawak (Artocarpus anisophyllus) is a rainforest fruit from Borneo and parts of Malaysia. It belongs to the breadfruit family, and the texture of the edible aril confirms the relationship.

The orange aril surrounding each seed tastes like roasted pumpkin with a hint of chestnut. The fruit has a milder aroma than its relative, the durian, making it far more approachable for first-timers. Entawak rarely appears outside of local markets in Sarawak and Sabah, so tasting it usually requires a trip to Borneo.

• Taste: Pumpkin-like, nutty, lightly sweet
• Origin: Borneo, Malaysia
• Best use: Eating fresh, local snack

Enterprise Apple

Bred by Purdue, Rutgers, and the University of Illinois, the Enterprise apple was engineered to resist apple scab, a fungal disease that plagues commercial orchards. The result is a glossy, deep red apple with thick skin and a firm, crunchy bite.

Fresh off the tree, Enterprise tastes tart and slightly spicy. After a month in cold storage, the sharpness mellows into a balanced sweet-tart flavor that bakers love. It holds its shape in pies, crisps, and tarts without turning to mush, which makes it one of the strongest baking apples in the E category.

• Taste: Tart, spicy, sweetens with storage
• Origin: United States (university-bred hybrid)
• Best use: Baking, pies, crisps, fresh eating after storage

Ethiopian Banana (Enset)

The enset plant (Ensete ventricosum) looks almost identical to a banana tree, and the two are close botanical relatives. But the fruit of the enset is full of hard, black seeds and is not eaten.

What feeds roughly 20 million people in southern Ethiopia is the starchy corm and pseudostem, not the fruit. Farmers scrape the inner pulp, bury it underground, and let it ferment for months into a dense, dough-like food called kocho. Kocho is baked into flatbread or boiled and served alongside stews. Enset is sometimes called “the tree against hunger” because a single mature plant can feed a person for weeks.

• Taste: Fermented, starchy, mildly sour (kocho)
• Origin: Ethiopian highlands
• Best use: Kocho flatbread, boiled starch, porridge

Etrog

The etrog is a citron (Citrus medica), not a lemon, although the two look similar at a glance. What sets the etrog apart is its enormously thick, bumpy rind, which can account for over 70% of the fruit. The juice content is almost nonexistent.

During the Jewish festival of Sukkot, a ritually pure etrog is one of the four species held during prayer. Outside of religious use, the thick rind is candied into a chewy, perfumed confection popular in Italian and Middle Eastern desserts. A single high-quality etrog during Sukkot season can sell for $30 to $300, depending on its shape, color, and blemish-free surface.

• Taste: Sour, barely any juice, intensely aromatic rind
• Origin: Southeast Asia, now cultivated in Israel, Italy, and California
• Best use: Religious ritual (Sukkot), candied citron peel, perfumery

European Pear

The teardrop silhouette of the European pear (Pyrus communis) is the shape most people picture when they hear “pear.” Varieties like Bartlett, Anjou, Bosc, and Comice all belong to this species.

Ripe European pears are soft, juicy, and sweet with a buttery texture that dissolves on the tongue. This is the opposite of Asian pears, which stay crunchy even when fully ripe. European pears ripen best off the tree. Leave them at room temperature until the flesh near the stem gives slightly under thumb pressure, and they are ready to eat.

• Taste: Sweet, buttery, melting texture
• Origin: Western Europe, Central Asia
• Best use: Fresh eating, poaching, cheese pairing, tarts

Evergreen Huckleberry

Native to the Pacific Coast from British Columbia down to central California, the evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum) produces small, dark purple berries on shrubs that keep their leaves year-round.

The flavor sits between a blueberry and a mild blackberry, with slightly more crunch from the small seeds and a deeper, more complex sweetness. Foragers pick them in late summer and early fall. The berries freeze well and work in pies, jams, muffins, and pancakes. Florists also use the evergreen branches in floral arrangements.

• Taste: Sweet-tart, deeper than blueberry, crunchy seeds
• Origin: Pacific Coast of North America
• Best use: Jams, pies, muffins, foraging

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